Author: Sami Honkonen

My guest for this episode is Annu Nieminen, the CEO and founder of The Upright Project. We talk about Annu’s work history at McKinsey and Kasvuryhmä and about Annu’s newest project, The Upright Project.

Currently we measure companies using mainly financial indicators and, obviously, that’s just one piece of the pie. The Upright Project is trying to fix that and is working on building ways to measure the impact of companies more holistically. Basically they’re hoping to create a set of metrics for the companies impact on the environment, on knowledge, on society and on the health of its employees.

I met Annu some years ago and I really enjoy having discussions with her since she is sharp as a knife and very passionate about her work. Hope you enjoy this episode too!

For this episode, my guest is Christopher Avery, the man behind The Responsibility Process. The Responsibility Process is a model to help you recognize unproductive mental states and help you take responsibility.

I learned about The Responsibility Process from Christopher roughly 7 years ago and it has stayed with me since. It’s one of my go-to tools personally and I often use it with teams.

We discussed about how one can learn to use The Responsibility Process and how it is useful model for both individuals and teams.

The model has been condensed into a fairly simple poster. You can find it from the link list below.

My guest is Markku Kulmala. Markku is one of the most prominent scientists in the world in the field of atmospheric and earth system sciences. At University of Helsinki, he leads a research group that has more than 35 published papers in journals Nature and Science. Markku is the person you want to learn from on the topic of climate change research.

We talk about how they do their research, what their initial results show and how they’re hoping the results help humankind fight climate change.

For this episode, my guest is Henrik Kniberg. Henrik is a prominent figure in the agile community. If you’ve seen the video on Spotify engineering culture, that video is created by him. He has also authored several books on agile.

Henrik is also one of the early guests of the the podcast and the previous episode we did was about two years ago. Back then we discussed Henrik’s agile coaching work at Lego and Spotify and how he helped his kids win a robot battle against experienced programmers.

But now, recently, he has shifted his professional focus towards something more important. He’s focusing on reducing the impact of climate change.

We talk about how to be climate neutral, how to invest in climate projects, the community Henrik is running called Climate Crisplet, and how companies should deal with climate change.

I’m interviewing Bjarte Bogsnes. Bjarte is one of the key people behind the adaptive management model called Beyond Budgeting. If there’s one person you want to learn about Beyond Budgeting from, it’s Bjarte.

Bjarte is one of the key people who have been leading Statoil’s journey from traditional corporate budgeting to a completely new management style. Along the way, he’s authored books on the things he has learned.

What’s good to know before we get started is that despite the name, Beyond Budgeting is not only about getting rid of budgeting. It is a new approach to management that emphasizes empowerment and adaptivity.

Beyond Budgeting’s 12 principles cover topics such as purpose, values, transparency, autonomy, targets and resource allocation. It is much larger than just budgets.

This is my interview with Harri Valpola. Harri is the CEO of Curious AI, a Helsinki-based 20 person startup that’s aiming to build a general artificial intelligence. Now that’s a pretty bold goal when Facebook’s head of AI research just recently said that in terms of general intelligence, we’re not even close to a rat.

Harri is a respected researcher in the field of artificial intelligence. He knows his stuff. The previous company he founded, ZenRobotics, builds robots so that’s pretty cool too.

We talk about what general artificial intelligence would be like, whether we should try to simulate the human brain or not and how curiosity is a great guide in life.

Today’s guest is Bengt Holmström. Bengt is Finnish, but he’s spent the last 40 years living in the US. Currently he’s a professor of economics at MIT.

Bengt was recently awarded the Nobel prize in economic sciences together with his Harvard colleague Oliver Hart for their contribution to contract theory.

Essentially, Bengt has spent decades studying incentives and trying to figure out how to design better incentive structures. This has been a recurring theme on the podcast so I’m sure you can appreciate how excited I am to have Bengt on as a guest.

We talk about what it feels like to win the Nobel prize, incentives (obviously), and how transparency isn’t necessarily always a good thing.

Today’s topic is machine learning and I’m talking to one of the brightest minds in the field, Hilary Mason. She’s the founder of Fast Forward Labs, a machine intelligence research company. She also advises startups through Accel, a prominent venture capital firm.